On this topic, here are a couple of aspects we're currently working on 
for an eventual call for papers on 'Creative Industries' as a key 
aspect of contemporary (UK) policy that is presumed to address 
inequality.
Leigh


• the manner in which Creative Industries policy, while seeming to 
offer a certain freedom of creative autonomy and self-realisation for 
workers, is in fact explicitly bound up in finding new articulations of 
existing power relations – the way in which notions of passion for, and 
pleasure in, work serve as disciplinary devices, enabling very high 
levels of (self-) exploitation, noting the extremely low levels of 
union organisation in most cultural industries.
" [T]he cultural industries are seen as complex value chains where 
profit is extracted at key nodes in the chain through control of 
production investment and distribution and the key “creative” labour is 
exploited not, as in the classic Marxist analysis of surplus value, 
through the wage bargain, but through contracts determining the 
distribution of profits to various rights holders negotiated between 
parties with highly unequal power (Caves 2000). ... [T]he political 
economy approach placed its major emphasis on the technologies of 
distribution, on the ways in which key economic and regulatory debates 
were to be seen as struggles over access to distribution under shifting 
technological conditions without any necessary effect on either the 
nature of the product being distributed or the relation with the 
audience. In particular, this analysis stressed the ways in which the 
profits of the whole process were returned to controllers of 
technological distribution systems rather than to the original 
producers of the cultural products or services."
(From Cultural to Creative Industries: An analysis of the implications 
of the “creative industries” approach to arts and media policy making 
in the United Kingdom, Nicholas Garnham,International Journal of 
Cultural Policy Vol 11, No. 1 2005 )

  "82% of visual artists recently surveyed (by far the highest 
proportion of all artforms) earned a mere £5,000 per year (gross) or 
less, from their  artistic activity."  
  "90% of the arts budget is absorbed by ‘administration’ [within the 
existing ‘arts’ infrastructure, managers, project developers and 
administrators] with only 10% actually being awarded to artists."
(The Scottish  Artists Union, www.sau.org.uk)



• the way in which an abstract rhetoric of creativity is becoming 
increasingly important to the fuelling of labour markets marked by 
irregular, insecure and unprotected work; this argument in turn has had 
much wider implications in that it has pushed education policy much 
more strongly in the direction of a discourse of skills, on the basis 
that future national prosperity depends upon making-up for a supposed 
lack of creative, innovative workers.
"Organisations and employers are increasingly looking for a creatively 
agile workforce and there is a growing awareness of the advantages of 
starting this work early on in the school years. Key to this vision of 
creative education is the development of relationships with a variety 
of partners from the cultural, creative and business sectors..."
http://www.creative-partnerships.com



• the received notion that there is a 'creative class' intensely 
interested in cultural goods of many kinds, which in turn gives rise to 
the idea that cities must 'invest' in and through culture; apparently 
benign terms such as 'creative cities' and 'creative clusters' have 
become increasingly prevalent as a way of describing culture-led 
regeneration strategies: the 'moral prestige' of the creative artist 
has become extremely useful to policy-makers, consultants etc.
"Peck and Tickell see neoliberalism articulated in the city through a 
combination of market ideologies and forces. For them, neoliberalism 
embodies a growth-first ideology, backed by a pervasive naturalisation 
of market discipline. Neoliberalism operates through and alongside 
active state partners, scanning the horizon for investment 
opportunities in an increasingly competitive urban environment. 
Neoliberalism locks-in public sector austerity and growth-oriented 
investment. A symbolic language of innovation – “dynamic”, 
“pioneering”, “daring”, “entrepreneurial” – obfuscates a familiar 
cocktail of state subsidy, place promotion and local boosterism 
(talking up or promoting a locale), and suppresses the opportunity for 
genuinely local development. Neoliberal policy in the urban framework 
is characterised by uneven development, creating massive social 
polarisations in and between cities as highly mobile capital seeks 
profit unhindered by a regulatory framework."
Constructing Neoliberal Glasgow: The Privatisation Of Space, Friend of 
Zanetti, Variant issue 25






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